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Showing posts with label Women in STEM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women in STEM. Show all posts

1 November 2018

Women are thriving in canine science - tell a girl you know!

Women are thriving in canine science - tell a girl you know!

When we learned why girls aren't pursuing futures in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, we wanted to help.

At Do You Believe in Dog? we're enthusiastic about canine science for lots of reasons. Clearly - dogs are awesome. So is science! Since starting the blog in 2012, we've noticed that dogs offer a wonderful way to get others interested in science. People who might not have thought it was for them. Canine science is also fantastic because of its inherent diversity. 

Whether you are interested in evolutionary biology, statistics, genetics, human psychology, animal behaviour, wearable tech, nutrition, anatomy, ecology, urban design, communication, biochemistry, exercise physiology, animal-technology interactions, bio-monitoring, science communication or animal learning - canine science offers a way to be involved! 

 To showcase how females are thriving in science, we reached out to a selection of the amazing group of woman succeeding in canine-related science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) globally. 

 They wanted to help too.

 Thanks to their support, we'll be featuring one of these fabulous women each day on our social media channels in November, so be sure to keep track on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.

Here's why we're doing this...

Fewer girls than boys study and work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, and the gap between girls and boys is growing. Research into biological factors, including genetics, brain structure and development, neuroscience and hormones, shows that the gender gap in STEM is not the result of sex differences in these factors or related to any type of 'innate ability'. 

When young, girls and boys show the same level of interest and abilities in STEM. They may demonstrate different approaches to solving the same issue - exactly why we need both in these fields as diversity offers strength and flexibility in solving problems. Sadly, social, cultural and educational discrimination and biases are leading to girls losing interest in STEM. The ages between 10-15 have been identified as most critical, with many 15 year olds having already lost interest in STEM subjects. 
Several recent studies have explored this trend across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia, surveying tens of thousands of girls and women.

GIRLS CITED A LACK OF FEMALE ROLE MODELS IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,  ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICS AS A KEY REASON THEY DIDN'T FOLLOW A CAREER IN THE SECTOR

  • Having visible female role models almost doubles the number of girls interested in STEM careers and helps them to picture themselves pursuing these fields. 
  • There is a clear link between role models and an increased passion for science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, with more interest in careers in these fields, and greater self-confidence. 
  • Perhaps surprisingly, celebrities are considered to be the least influential role models for driving girls’ interest in STEM, while women working in STEM fields are the top drivers, with the most impact.
  • Increased interest in STEM isn’t limited to a single subject. On average, across maths, physics, biology, chemistry and computer science, having a STEM role model results in a 12 percent increase in interest.
  • Equally as important, results show that if a girl has a role model for a particular subject area, such as maths, a corresponding positive effect is still seen across all other STEM fields.
Girls also become more interested in STEM once they’re able to conceive what they can do with these subjects in real life situations and how relevant they are to their future.

 The women in canine science want to help inspire the next generation of girls to know that STEM is accessible, fun and waiting for them. And importantly - SO ARE THE DOGS!

Do You Believe in Dog? are honoured to help share insights to the exciting work in this field and the advice today's women would like to pass on to girls considering a future in STEM. 

So tell a girl you know that females are thriving in canine science. Today, please!

Mia and Julie
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26 September 2014

Cat and Dogs: seeking solutions with sniffing canines and science

Cat and Dogs: seeking solutions with sniffing canines and science

Hi Mia and Julie, 


 First of all, I LOVE your blog! 

 After meeting at SPARCS this past summer (summer for us in North America.. I take it summer is just beginning in Australia!), I’ve followed it closely. 

 You do amazing things for the promotion of  canine science. Serious love.

 A bit of background for the readers: I’m currently doing my PhD at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Simon Gadbois. 

 Dr. Gadbois has an amazing amount of knowledge and experience in the science of sniffing (just check out Gadbois & Reeve, 2014 link below!). 

He’s trained sniffer dogs for the conservation of ribbon snakes and wood turtles, to track coyotes, and to detect invasive pests in lumber. He and I have taken on a different type of project and are studying the intricacies of biomedical detection dogs, specifically, the very interesting phenomenon of Diabetic Alert Dogs. 

Cat Reeve at #SPARCS2014 where she won the 'Best Emerging Researcher' prize

I say interesting because there’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that some dogs alert their owners to hypoglycemic events (low blood sugar). In 2008, Deborah Wells published a series of case studies where dogs were reported as signalling (barking, licking, pawing etc. the individual) while their owners were awake, while they were sleeping, and even when their owners were in a different room with the door closed! And this is with no previous training! 

 Isn’t this fantastic! Severe hypoglycemic events can be extremely dangerous for individuals with diabetes. If not treated, they can lead to seizures, comas, and even death. The fact that dogs may be able to alert an individual before a serious hypoglycemic event means less worry about hypoglycaemia unawareness, and blood sugar dropping over night when individuals are unconscious.
Given that dogs are signalling through closed doors, it is assumed that the dogs smell something that alerts them to a change in the physiology of their owner (as opposed to behavioural cues, as is believed to be the case with seizure alert dogs). There are many companies that have taken advantage of this supposed ability, and have trained Diabetic Alert Dogs (DADs) to sell to individuals with diabetes. 

 In my own searches, I have found no company that publicly provides information as to how they train their dogs. However, according to recent studies (see Gonder-Frederick et al., 2013 and Rooney et al., 2011 below) these trained DADs dogs contribute greatly to the families of individuals’ with diabetes; they signal consistently and, consequently, significantly reduce the number of hypoglycemic events an individual experiences. 

 Now, if it is in fact an olfactory cue that dogs use to identify a drop in blood sugar in their owners, one would expect that if you presented one of these trained DADs with the “scent” of hypoglycemia without the individual present (just like having the owner with diabetes on the other side of a door), the dog would still signal. 

 Dehlinger and colleagues recently tested three DADs in a lab setting, presenting the dogs with human biological samples that were obtained identically to the way the samples used to train the dogs were obtained. In this study, none of the three dogs could pick out a hypoglycemic sample from a normoglycemic sample! DARN!

 So what is it that these dogs smell? How is it that some DADs are accurate at signalling hypoglycaemia but evidently cannot signal in the lab? 

 Enter ME! This is what I’m trying to figure out!

 One possibility is that, at least in the study outlined above, the use of sweat samples was misguided. Maybe the volatiles are more strongly present in an individual’s breath. I am currently in the process of testing whether there is one channel more likely than others to expel the volatiles needed to detect a change in blood sugar, i.e. breath, sweat, or saliva. 

 So far we’ve found that, after being trained to detect extremely low saliency scents, our dogs can detect and discriminate between human breath samples with incredible ease and accuracy (see the video of Koda discriminating between breath samples). 


Little Koda discriminating between breath samples. The jar that has the check mark on it is the target sample. The jar with the x+ is a different breath sample. When Koda first enters the room, he smells a jar that is the “sample” (it matches the target sample)... This is the smell we want him to find amongst the three jars that are closer to the camera. He chooses the right one!

Preliminary tests with patient samples suggest that our dogs can also tell the difference between breath samples taken from the same individual when their blood sugar was low, when it was normal, and when it was high (unpublished). 

 Also, it’s possible that in the Dehlinger et al. (2013) study, the sample collection procedure was simply not sufficient enough to contain the volatiles produced during a hypoglycemic event. With the help of a fantastic chemist at Dalhousie (Dr. Peter Wentzell), we have perfected a procedure that coats cotton balls in silicone oil. This is believed to help contain the volatiles through the *magic of chemistry.  

 *may actually be science, not magic - check with the chemists

 Another potential is that these DADs are simply responding to a general stress response in the body. It’s possible that DADs (and untrained dogs who signal to their owners) are picking up on the physiological change associated with stress (changes in cortisol, adrenaline etc.). Kind of how people say animals can smell when you’re scared. 

 If this is truly what’s happening, you would expect to see DADs giving a lot of false alarms. 

 And in fact, personal communication with friends of friends who own DADs tell me that their DADs alert to not only hypoglycemic events, but to asthma attacks, anxiety attacks, etc. If you read carefully, few studies ask owners of DADs if their dog gives a lot of false alarm signals (dog signals to their owner and after the owner checks their blood sugar, they discover that they are not low). 

 Isn’t this fascinating? 

 The dogs I work with are incredible (shout out to the amazing owners that let me work with their dogs every week), and have incredible work ethic and sniffers. 


Our dogs are extremely motivated to work (because we make it super fun!). This is Nutella on her “break”. She doesn’t want a break. She wants to keep working! She’s whining and pawing at the door of the work room.


With the assistance of these amazing dogs, hopefully Dr. Gadbois and myself will be able to shed light on how exactly DADs do their job in the near future - I'll let you know how we go!


 Cat Reeve
PhD Candidate
Dalhousie University
CANADA

Follow Cat on Twitter

Follow the Dalhousie Canid Behaviour Research Team on Facebook

Check out #DogsOfDal on Instagram

Further reading:

Brown S.W. & Strong V. (2001). The use of seizure-alert dogs, Seizure, 10 (1) 39-41. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1053/seiz.2000.0481 

 Dehlinger, K., Tarnowski, K., House, J.L., Los, E., Hanavan, K., Bustamante, B., Ahmann, A.J., & Ward, W.K. (2013). Can trained dogs detect a hypoglycemic scent in patients with Type 1 Diabetes? Diabetes Care (Observations), 36, 98-99. 

 Fier, B.M. (2004). Morbidity of hypoglycaemia in type 1 diabetes. Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, 65, 47-52. 

 Gadbois, S., & Reeve, C. (2014). Canine Olfaction: Scent, Sign and Situation. In A.  Horowitz (ed.). Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior. New York: Springer. 

 Gonder-Frederick L., D. Warren, K. Vajda & J. Shepard (2013). Diabetic Alert Dogs: A Preliminary Survey of Current Users, Diabetes Care, 36 (4) e47-e47. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/dc12-1998  

 Rooney N.J., Morant, S. & Guest, C. (2013). Investigation into the Value of Trained Glycaemia Alert Dogs to Clients with Type I Diabetes, PLoS ONE, 8 (8) e69921. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0069921

 Matyka K.A. (2002). Sweet dreams? - nocturnal hypoglycemia in children with type 1 diabetes, Pediatric Diabetes, 3 (2) 74-81. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1034/j.1399-5448.2002.30203.x   

 Wells D.L., Lawson S.W. & Siriwardena A.N. Canine responses to hypoglycemia in patients with type 1 diabetes., Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.), PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19040375

© Cat Reeve | Do You Believe in Dog? 2014

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10 August 2014

Canine Science Forum 2014 - we come full circle!

Canine Science Forum 2014 - we come full circle!

Aw - it's Us @ CSF2014! Thanks Tamás Faragó :)
Dear Julie,
while you've been off enjoying the fjords of Norway and I've been recovering from six legs of long haul flying with a three year old as hand luggage, I thought I'd put up a quick post to recap the wonderful week in Lincoln, UK that was the (Feline and) Canine Science Forum 2014.

Such a fun, stimulating, inspiring week comprising the Feline Science day (Monday), public lecture by James Serpell (rhymes with purple) on Monday evening, Canine Science Forum (Tue-Wed-Thu), including the wonderful gala dinner at Lincoln Castle on Wednesday night and finally, the Companion Animals: Human Health & Disease day (Friday).

If anyone out there happened to miss it, we live tweeted nearly all of the presentations so you can easily catch up on all the great thoughts via the magic of Storify here.


 Feline Science Day:

Public lecture by James Serpell:


 Canine Science Forum Day 1:
Canine Science Forum Day 2:

Which, of course, included us being real life #scientists (we don't make this stuff up!):


 You talked about Project: Play with Your Dog and the role that citizen science can play in canine science.

 Nancy Dreschel (now on Twitter at @ndreschel) presented the key findings from our collaborative meta-analysis looking at canine salivary cortisol.

And I explored if using group averages is really the best way to determine and analyse the stress and welfare experience of working dogs (and my points were relevant to all animals!).

Then we drank wine in at a castle. Which was a mighty fine way to end that day.


 Canine Science Forum Day 3:


Companion  Animals: Human Health & Disease 2014


We heard the exciting news that the next Canine Science Forum is to be held in Padova, Italy in 2016.

 We continued on in England after CSF, down to visit the Animal Welfare and Behaviour Group at Bristol University - it was lovely to share some of our experiences and ideas with this team and we look forward to keeping up with their great work in the future.

And while we took a nap to recover, Do You Believe in Dog? went and turned two years old on us! So here we are - at the end of the original two years that we agreed to do this for, back in that first email exchange not even week after we met. 

120 blog posts with over 170,000 views, 8,900 tweets and over 8,400 followers on Facebook. 

Julie - I don't know how I can ever thank you enough for agreeing to join me on this adventure. I am so proud of how Do You Believe in Dog? has helped bring canine science to everyone. I am equally humbled and thrilled by the community that has grown around our pen pal exchanges - along with the popular guest posts by Clare, Brad, Heather, Christy, Claudia and Lindsay - and feel excited for the future of canine science and its ongoing transfer to the general public. 



Above all Julie, I am so grateful for your beautiful friendship which was perhaps the most fun surprise of this two year journey we have shared. Behind the posts of DYBID? are many email exchanges, Skype calls and messages. Through this media we have developed an incredibly open and honest friendship that I will always cherish. I respect you, your scientific and science communication work enormously. I have learned much from you and look forward to what comes next - for both of us.

"What's that?" you ask?  You'll see!

 Mia

 Further reading:

 Do You Believe in Dog? - all the posts from the last two years!

 Hecht, J. and Cooper, C. B. (2014) Tribute to Tinbergen: Public Engagement in Ethology, Ethology, 120 (3) 207-214. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eth.12199

 Hecht, J. (2014) Canine Science: a trend you can easily get behind. Dog Spies, Scientific American Blog Network.

 Cobb, M. and Hecht, J. (2014) Do You Believe in Dog? An experiment in scientific communication. Canine Science 1 (1) 10-12 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/09.0011/cs.082014

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3 July 2014

Igniting Sparks, Surviving Fireworks and Dog Science July!

Igniting Sparks, Surviving Fireworks and Dog Science July!

Hey Julie, 

well, here I am, back in chilly, wintry Melbourne. #SPARCS2014 was an amazing event - such an intense three days with early feedback suggesting over 40,000 people joined in online for canine science, excitement, wonderful researchers and inspiration! 

 You've done a great job capturing the essence and feedback of this international conference over at DogSpies on the Scientific American Blog Network. I'm so pleased someone took photos, or I think I would have convinced myself it was all just a rather lovely dream! 


I loved our time together in Rhode Island and New York - especially the bit where we ate Peter Pan donuts and talked about - actually, all I remember now is the original glazed. Ahhhh. Donnuuuuttttttttttts.


I'm betting we were probably talking about what a crazy month July is shaping up to be - and by crazy, I mean in all the best ways. We've both returned home only to launch into full conference-prep-mode the Canine Science Forum (this year also featuring, for the first time, the Feline Science Forum) July14-17th - people can follow on Twitter @CSFFSF2014 at #CSFFSF2014.

I'm excited that we are both sharing our own research at the conference in the form of oral presentations and posters, so we've both got plenty to prepare. I've enjoyed reading over the newly-released Scientific Programme to see what other topics are being presented! These 30-ish original research presentations represent the latest in our field in the two years since the 3rd CSF in Barcelona (where we met!) as well as the introduction of a new 'Controversies in Canine Science' talks (with topics like 'To what extent does hybrid vigour exist in dogs?'). Talks are sure to ignite more passionate discussions, like those we enjoyed in the panel discussions at SPARCS 2014. 


With just two weeks to go, I'm thinking things might get a little quiet here on the blog as we focus on preparing to share our research. I know I am going to need every spare moment to get organised and travel to the UK where I also get to see my gorgeous sister in law get married before we meet up again in Lincoln. 

I hope everyone who enjoys our blog will keep in touch with our updates on Facebook and Twitter during July.

Perhaps it's a good time to review some posts from our archives? 
So much great canine science discussed over the two years since we launched the Do You Believe in Dog? project. It's actually really fun to reflect on how much we've shared in the course of writing to each other. 

With 4th of July hitting various parts of the world this week, I'd probably recommend the series of posts we've both contributed to about helping our canine companions with fireworks:

I'm going back to drafting my presentation powerpoint for #CSFFSF2014 now Julie - see you in Lincoln, UK soon!

Mia


p.s. So great to hear the incredible feedback from our two #SPARCS2014 free ticket giveaway winners:

"Thank you SO MUCH for the ticket to the SPARCS 2014 conference.  It was incredible... it felt life-changing."


Read what we shared at the last Canine Science Forum (2012):

Hecht J. (2013). Physical prompts to anthropomorphism of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 8 (4) e30. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2013.04.013

Cobb M.; Branson, N.; McGreevy, P. (2013). Advancing the welfare of Australia’s iconic working dogs, Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 8 (4) e42-e43. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2013.04.054


 © Mia Cobb | Do You Believe in Dog? 2014

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